hawk wrote:I really like the game Dragon Wing, although it is extremely difficult, and think that the graphics and motion is exceptionally smooth.
I was interested to know of any other games which use the multicolor character mode of the Vic.
I moved this question to the programming forum, as it's really from a programming perspective that I'm interested in multicolor characters.
From this image below, it seems that I've found another game that is using them. The game is Bongo. I haven't played it yet, so I couldn't say what the performance is like.
Not from what I've seen on the VIC. Most of them only use 2 colors per character...foreground and background. OK, so they can be different for every character on the screen, but each character still only uses 2 colors.
I'm interested in ones which have the multicolor bit set in the color table.
OK...after further investigation, it seems as though there are quite a few games which are using the multicolor characters. The resolution, however, seems to be a real killer.
Galaxians by Atarisoft is an example of a multicolour game.
It is interesting because "Space Battle" by Commodore is another Galaxians clone in which they've chosen NOT to use multi-colour graphics.
It's interesting to see the different approaches to the same game.
Space Battle looks great, and is pretty fun. Actually in the early 80s it was the closest you could come to arcade Galaxian at home. The motion is slightly choppy and sometimes your shots will go through an enemy, but overall the game is very good.
The AtariSoft version is the "official" conversion of Galaxian. The motion is a little smoother and closer to the arcade, but the graphics are SO blocky, in my opinion it really detracts from the experience.
Oh yes, a couple more multicoloured Atarisoft titles: Pole Position, Jungle Hunt. I'm sure a modern remake of Pole Position could look even better, with perfection of raster tricks and alike to improve colour resolution.
Don't forget Ms. Pacman. It's one of the best examples of a multicolor game. I feel like most vic games make some use of multi-color just because they could. Just shuffle through some of the games on the front page. I actually think it was overused, some of those games could have looked better without that stretched 4 by 8 blocky look.
There is something to be said for playing to the weakness of such "fat pixel" modes. I recall a cartridge game I had ... I think by UMI for the vic. It was AMAZING. It was a defender style game with insects. Now, think about it, by choosing a side scroller, most of your ships and what not are going to be long and slender. The perfect type of shape to minimize the impact of poor horizontal resolution!!
I wonder if it is possible to get multiple colors in Hi-res mode by interlacing, or would it just look stupid like the 2600 pacman did? E.g. you show a hires character(s) for one frame, then change the color ram and show another hi-res character(s) with the new colors in the places you wanted them. I think some of the vic picture viewer do this?? Or am I way off base here. Doesn't the eye still get tricked at 30fps?
rambling ....
I might try such a silly technique in my pacman game I am trying to make, but I may not be clever enough to pull it off well
I don't know what interlace mode can do (it is not present on PAL VIC-20 to begin with), but with raster timing you can do a lot of nice things. You could of course mix character graphics in "hires" mode with characters in "multi-colour" mode, and with rasters change at least one of the two auxillary colours (two if you don't mind changing border colour, all three if you need a different background colour).
There are several picture formats. The one in VIMM uses raster timing so for each scan line (I think, perhaps even on column basis) you can select three auxillary colours. It increases the total colour resolution greatly, as you no longer are restricted to one set of colours for the whole screen. On the other hand, I don't know if it would work well for anything else than displaying static pictures.
I think interlacing was the wrong term on my part since it refers to a specific mode of the vic. I had heard the 2600 didn't have enough sprites ( players ) to do pacman so the programmers tried to have a sprite in 2 places at once, and that was why they flickered so bad ....
What I was wondering is ... say you had an NTSC vic. You would show a character for one frame, then a different character for the next frame, repeat. So you would see one character 30 times a second, and another character 30 times a second. Wouldn't they blur together? Could you simulate at least 4 colors with this technique? Or do you think the graphic would just appear to flicker and look stupid? Certainly it would have less intensity that a graphics that was displayed the full 60 frames. If it did work, it seems that it could be used for games at least to no worse effect than the 2600 pacman; although many would argue that was really bad ...
I was also toying with a similar idea using color instead of character shape. Changing the color of a character from red to black, or red to white, rapidly to get a darker or lighter shade of red.
You're assuming that the frame rate corresponds to the refresh rate, which may not always be the case. When there is a lot of processing going on then you may have a frame rate which drops lower than 20fps, which is where you will be seeing flickering. The human eye has a latency of 10ms, which means that anything it sees stays on the retina for 10ms. It's a good rule of thumb to have the image change at least twice as fast as the lowest latency, which is why movies can get away with being 24fps, as the frames blend into each other.
So, in theory if you had a character alternating at 30fps, it would appear to be one image so colour blending could be possible.
Is it possible on a VIC? That I don't know!
I forget that the Vic 20 has only 1 mhz. I've seen raster interrupts to split the screen and border into 2 colors on top and bottom. Can this trick also be used with character color. Making the first 4 pixel rows one color and the other 4 another color? I assume it can be done with the right timing.
